Saturday, July 18, 2015

Dijsselbloem is a bad economist

Dijsselbloem is a bad economist. He is saying these days, after the Tsipras government has agreed to a package of policies it does not believe in, in numerous interviews in the Dutch media, that the "reforms" his Eurogroup is prescribing to Tsipras will be to the benefit of the Greek people.

Dijsselbloem is like a doctor prescribing a bitter medicine to a patient saying: "This will cure your disease."

But prescribing a medical treatment is different from prescribing political econmic "reforms". In the first you may believe (or not), in the second you should not believe unless you agree with it and history has shown there is reason to believe in it. In the Greek referendum 61 percent of the people have said they did not believe in the Eurogroup's medicine.

Over the past five years we have seen that the Eurogroup medicine did not solve Greece's debt and growth problems. Therefore, Dijsselbloem should have known better.

Moreover, over the past five months his colleague Varoufakis has explained that the Eurogroup medicine would not work and that there is a better medicine. If he had been a good economist, Dijsselbloem would have listened carefully to the arguments of the new Greek government and explained why he did not believe in Varoufakis/Tsipras' plans and preferred to stick to the Eurogroup's Diktat.

In revising this post, I hesitated whether I should call the Eurogroup's medicine a Diktat, but former managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has no problem in using that term, I read this Sunday morning in Le Figaro: DSK dénonce le diktat que l'Europe a imposé à la Grèce.

About Me

As a kid I liked numbers and the sound of strings. I considered studying engineering but chose social sciences because of my interest in people. I combine a theoretical interest with a practical, social approach which brought me to the sphere of policy research. I am interested in reducing the disparity between poor and rich, between the powerful and the less powerful.
In 1973 and 1982 I lived in Latin America. In the mid-1980s, I was able to create an international forum to discuss the functioning of the international monetary system and the debt crisis, the Forum on Debt and Development (FONDAD). I established it with the view that the debt crisis of the 1980s was a symptom of a malfunctioning, flawed global monetary and financial system.
I was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the European Network on Debt and Development that was established at the end of the 1980s to help put pressure on European policymakers.
In 1990, before the beginning of the Gulf War, I cofounded the Golfgroep, a discussion group about international politics comprising journalists, scientists, politicians and activists that meets regularly.
The website of FONDAD is www.fondad.org